Why are we still writing books using text (for the most part)? Doing it with pictures or other methods is frequently not clear enough even for fiction. Text is concise, or at least more-so than other methods.

Isn't Unity built on Gnome3? You may mean Gnome Shell, which I find far more usable than Unity, but just as unstable. I've since moved on to KDE and can't see myself leaving unless I have an old machine where I'll use Xfce or OpenBox or something.

I'm not talking about that stuff, as I agree with you. I don't like people trying to lock people out of using competing services. This stuff:

no longer to include in its agreements with publishers any written or unwritten obligations that would require them to source online search advertisements exclusively from Google... [or] to impose obligations that would prevent advertisers from porting or managing search advertising campaigns across competing advertising platforms.

I know what copyright is for, but you're not allowed to patent algorithms. This more than most software patents is an algorithm with how to create a result from set of common existing sensor inputs. It should not be patentable based on that alone.

Your Move Patent Office. Are they trying to patent an idea again? More precisely, an overly broad, idea that would be fairly trivial to implement using existing hardware. Given that, do they have even a working implementation? These are real questions, I haven't read TFA. These are the kind of patents that need to stop though. Copyright the implementation of your algorithm and move on.

I would guess that this could be snuck into some other appliction, possibly even through the Apple store if someone is very clever. It's just a proof of concept so far and Appple does not allow side-loading, while Android does, as do jailbroken devices.

For cost savings and flexibility, getting rid of office for a more open alternative is the first step towards being able to use non-Microsoft platforms for desktops as well. Once you're not tied to them you can start looking at Linux, OSX, Android, etc. The lock-in is gone. If Microsoft is paying attention, this should scare the crap out of them.